First - you remind me to a special concrete problem concerning property rights. The UN treaty widely discussed in the board has been close to prevent a special evolution. There has been fear that many countries - especially third-world-countries - might declare their ownership and souverainship to inlude altitudes above their territory up to the orbits.

This evolution has been prevented successfully as far as I know. So Tonga cannot regulate space as well as the US and others.

So it might be very likely that they are interested in launches and wouldn't regulate them but only allow them if being payed for the allowance.

The export of the rocket won't be no problem of US law if tonga isn't on the COCOM-list. Then free trade is valid and the only question is what restrictions are valid in Tonga. They are a poor country with only few people - there won't be much restrictions I suppose.

In other third-world-countries the situation will be similar if they are free-trade-countries without civilan wars. If they allow launches and spacports etc. they might become rich - and the others will slightly turn to free trade for space launches. Perhaps!

I dunno man. I'd think they'd start out cheap, then realize this whole thing is a gold mine for them, then raise the restrictions to bilk the companies out of more cash? I could just see it, ten years later, after substantial infrastructure has been put in place, new zonings, permits, licenses, fees..

Oh wait, nevermind, that'll probably happen for every country eventually.

It might happen for every country - but not at the same time. There will be some pioneer-countries getting a natural advantage by being the first. Others will follow and having advantages form failures of sime of the first. And so on.

If you are a US Citizen then you are bound to US laws regardless of where you are, this means if you are a US citizen who happens to want to tow his spaceship to Nauru, you still have to have US permission to send it out of the country, transport it, launch it, and so on. That isn't the case with all countries, but it is with the USA. There are no "Flag of Convenience" tankers in space.

A good case is SeaLaunch. SeaLaunch is majoriy owned by Boeing, which is an American company, so it still must follow US procedures for launching, even though it launches from sea in the middle of nowhere with a Ukrainian rocket on a ship crewed mostly by Russians.

What way does that work? The US has to know what someone is doing in foreign countries to punish hurting US laws in foreign countries.

I would like to believe my government keeps abrest of its citizens working on devices that could easilly become IRBMs, abroad. In fact I have a nagging suspicion they do..

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And what if the law in that foreign country forces the US citizen to hurt US laws in that country?

That's not really applicable to this, which is good, as I don't know the answer.

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Or is it a kind of trade law like the COCOM list or the german laws forcing firms to get a governmental allowance for selling weapons to countries like Israel?

AFAIK, it's pretty much a given that US citizens and corporations are duty bound to follow US laws even when abroad. For instance, if legislation is passed stating that it is illegal to build a robot designed to locate and kill specific persons, an american roboticist can't just pack up his things, get a work visa to Ghana, and finish the killer robot there.

Space launch vehicles are just too dangerous to let them be built in a hundred banana republics, unregulated. Germany has had its own share of cracking down on (IMHO) legitamite launch concerns in the past. Check out what happened to OTRAG:

I'm still doubting because of the sovereignty of all countries. This sovereignty and the authority of laws established by this sovereignty is bound to the territory of that country unless its citizen is on an territory where no country is.

So if a US citizen is living in an country where he does something allowed there but not in the US the US can't punish him for that never. But if this citizen will leave that country for the US he is forbidden to continue that work in the US.

If the result of his work in the other country is allowed in the US but the work on the result is forbidden the citizen is allowed to import that result into the US without punishment I suppose. Otherwise he has to leave that result in the other country.

Partially it may be compared to the german situation of forbidden drugs - it's forbidden to have that drugs but it's not forbidden to consume them.

To return to your point - the US are required to know that the citizen is doing something that is allowed in the other country but forbidden in the US. This means that they have to spy its citizen all the time like the USSR etc. have done - I cannot imagine the US doing that.

Yeah. Otrag was a pretty cool BDB (Big Dumb Booster). Used motors from the windshield-wiper assemblies from Volkswagen Golfs if I am not mistaken among other cheap components. Political problems kept Otrag from becoming a reality.

Yes - these political problems recently have been mentioned at the forum of the german section of the Mars Society. I have been very awfully minded on that because Otrag was a project of students and has been assisted by NASA a little bit for example.

Another reason why spacecrafts, launches and space travels urgently have to be privatized.

European and north american countries certainly do keep tabs on those of their citizens building (or trying to) IRBMs, ICBMs or orbital launch vehicles. There's also regulations like ITAR that try, without too much success, to keep such toys out of the hands of undesirable countries.

Launching from developing countries. . .

I'd almost certainly stay away for any one of a number of reasons. A place where you regularly have to bribe the powers-that-be, having those powers still try to nationalize (steal) your assets once you're turning a profit or having a civil, religious or tribal war happen around you isn't a place I would like to launch from or base my multimillion dollar launch company. These reasons and lack of infrastructure take out africa and south-east asia as launch sites.

Maybe Brasil is sufficiently stable politically to launch from, though that country has its own launch program. That program might not like a profitable commercial operator stealing its thunder (and eliminating its subsidies).